


Through The Asphodel Meadows

by Flutiste



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post Reichenbach, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-07 00:28:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flutiste/pseuds/Flutiste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson mourned Sherlock Holmes, but it didn't mean that life has to stop... right?<br/>Didn’t want to abuse the tags, so here are the rest of the <b>WARNINGS</b><br/>Cynical view of the world, John is not a mourning widow, Sherlock is not John’s entire world, some audio hallucination, platonic love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through The Asphodel Meadows

**Author's Note:**

> This story is written from John’s POV, his opinion are not mine.  
> This work is unbetaed and I an not British, so there are probably some mistakes.  
> Please review!  
> PS: Now rewritten to clarify a few things. Not season 3 compatible as I rewrote this thing before 2014 (could only find the time to put it up now though), so no spoilers.

It was a sunny day, and it was both lovely and hateful.

Of course, it rained right after, which must mean something, but he still remembered it as that hateful sunny day.

***

She wanted him to talk, so he did.

His therapist was a tired woman; he didn’t need Sherlock to tell him that, the signs were there. Her eye bags, hidden under a layer of carefully applied makeup; her constant blinking, her eyes dry due to sleep deprivation; and more obviously, her distracted look when she thought he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t blame her, not really. Most of her clients were troubled veterans, people suffering from traumatic experiences, sucking happiness and energy out of her with their emotional distress. She didn’t actually cared about their stories, but John was a doctor, and he knew on a rational level that the way he grieved was not healthy, so he tried to respect her expertise.

_Which is understandably quite easy to do, since she had diagnosed you **so** well in the past._

He told her what happened, at least the public version of it. He could see that she was indifferent toward the question of whether Sherlock was a fake or not, and that she was trying to fit him into a box and find hidden meaning where there was none. He didn’t talk about how everything seemed pointless, including speaking to her, and how he did it just to show other people that he was coping, whatever they think coping meant. He didn’t say that he wasn’t coming back next week.

_Don’t bother with that, I am sure that she knows already, you are not that hard to read._

Because he didn’t want to stop grieving, not really, and it must be impossible to do so anyway.

When he walked out of her office, he felt worse than he did before. It was as if he sullied his memory by sharing part of it with someone who didn’t even care.

It was raining heavily, which suited his mood just fine.

***

He went to _his_ grave, and had to buy flowers. He knew nothing about them, but he couldn’t stand for the flowers to mean nothing, so he had to talk with the florist. Her name was Mary Morstan, and she was lovely, and he might have flirted with her once, before… everything. She was helpful, much more interested in listening to him talking about this dead person for whom he wanted to buy flowers than his therapist, and ended up convincing him to buy some carnations.

“You must have loved him very much,” she said when he asked about the flower’s meaning.

“We were not like that.” He didn’t have the energy to defend the nature of their relationship, and it angered him that people assumed that he cared so much only because he wanted to shag his friend.

_That’s the problem with most people. They **assume**._

“People do little else.” John mumbled, so low that the florist couldn’t hear him.

“I wasn’t implying anything,” she said gently. “I have a friend, and he is a man, and we have known each other for a long time. We used to sleep together on occasion, even after we hit our puberties, and nothing sexual ever happened. I understand how you can love someone else deeply without it being sexual or romantic.”

He thought about her words, and about Sherlock, and wished that he could have known him as long as Mary knew her friend.

“Yeah, I do,” he said finally. “I do love him very much.”

It was surprisingly easy to admit.

***

There were still a lot of people thinking that Sherlock was a fake out there, despite the media having lost their interest with the detective. This angered John a lot, and he thought about writing blog entries to defend his friend, but nothing rational came out, so he did not.

Pretending to be coping was surprisingly easy to do. He went through the motion of making tea, going to the surgery, drinking too much coffee, eating automatically to maintain his weight, and stopping to have nice chats with other people. Most people were easy to fool, eager to believe his lies about getting better.

But really, how can he be _alright_ when his best friend was dead?

Sherlock killed himself for some reason, and he didn’t stop him, couldn’t stop him.

His friend was anguished, and distressed, and he called him you machine.

John may be angry with the world, but he hated himself.

***

Mrs Hudson stopped going to the cemetery eventually, and he didn’t resent her for that, couldn’t. He now went to Sherlock’s grave monthly, just didn’t asked her to come along, and he hated the worried and pitying look she gave him every time she caught him leaving.

_She thinks you are fragile._

“No, I’m not.” He replied.

Not that he gave her much to worry about. He still smiled, even if it was a bit strained, and could talk about tea and weather and other similarly insignificant things as if they mattered. He was a soldier, he knew how to put on a mask of normalcy even when all he wanted to do was to tear the world apart or lay there dying, despite what Sherlock thought.

Lestrade called once or twice, before John stopped answering his phone, and tried to talk with him more than once after the funeral. John wasn’t feeling particularly forgiving toward the Detective Inspector however, so he took pleasure in slamming the door at his face. He knew that Lestrade was also grieving, and he knew that the DI was trying to seek closure by talking with him, but he didn’t want to give him the closure he needed, not yet.

_How vindictive of you. I thought you were supposed to be the better half._

“I can afford to be vindictive sometime,” he muttered. “You can’t have all the fun.”

He wanted to be angry, he wanted to find satisfaction in punishing the DI with his resentment, but he felt nothing.

Funny, that.

***

He dreamed about Sherlock sometime, most of the time.

Sometime he was back in Afghanistan, with the hot, dry air of the desert blowing on his skin and the harsh sunlight in his eyes. The soldiers dying around him all had Sherlock’s face, some blown up by minefields and some with bullet between their eyes. Sometime he was at St-Bart’s, either on the roof with Sherlock or back at the street, looking up. He could never reach the detective on time; could never say the right words to dissuade his friend from jumping. It was as if his dream self knew about the guilt that ate him alive, when grief was not drowning him, and would not give him the satisfaction of rewriting The Event. And he always woke up with the image of unseeing eyes looking accusingly at him.

It was his fault. He knew from the beginning that nothing good would come from Sherlock’s fame. He told the detective that the media would turn on them. But he didn’t do anything about it, nothing significant. Hasn’t he enjoyed the fame too, secretly, sometime? Enjoyed how people read his blog and commented about their adventures? Enjoyed the attention? It was all his fault. If he hasn’t written a blog, Moriarty may have had more difficulties in finding Sherlock’s weaknesses. If he had been a better friend, maybe the detective wouldn’t have jumped. If he knew the right words to say, maybe he could have saved his friend. If…

There was a lot of if to go through.

But the worst dreams were those in which Sherlock was still alive. Sometime he opened his eyes in the morning and could almost hear the sound of flasks and vials clanking together. Or he would dream about the horrible violin at 3 am in the morning, before waking up to the silence.

John locked away his gun.

***

Sarah started to notice his lack of sleep, hard to not to, with his dark circles and eyes bags. She was concerned, became more insistent regarding asking uncomfortable questions, and ended up prescribing him some sleeping pills.

John considered taking them, then decided not to. He was a doctor, so he knew well the risk of addiction with the quantity he needed to take. They accumulated in a small plastic bottle, collecting dust in a drawer beside his bed.

After a particularly nasty nightmare, John woke up sweating heavily, his heart beating furiously in his chest, and those pills became too tempting. It wouldn’t even be on purpose, his mind argued. Just an accident, because you are desperate for your nightmares to stop. An unintentional overdose, you are a doctor, you must know how to make a successful suicide look like an accident.

_Really, John, I don’t think you can **accidentally** overdose on sleeping pills. People are not that idiotic._

That’s true.

And the process would be painful and messy, and Mrs Hudson wouldn’t be able to rent out the flat anymore, and Sarah would blame herself, and someone will have to clean up after him, and the gun was much faster and less messy to use anyway.

John ended up crushing the pills and throwing them out with the garbage.

He wasn’t going to use them, not really, he wasn’t that idiotic.

It was just a passing thought, nothing more, and surely he would have used his gun if he really wanted to die.  
But, just in case.

***

It was always raining those days, for some reason. The sky a gloomy grey, the sun barely shining through the dark clouds and the humidity made John’s shoulder ache.

Everything was so depressing, he considered taking up a hobby.

Before his deployment to Afghanistan and his enrolment into the army, John used to be in a rugby team. That was the way he used to spend his time, training for games and partying with mates.

He was still fit now, and he got free time on his hands, but he couldn’t fit in that kind of life anymore. He tried it once, one of his friends from uni played in an amateur team and asked him to join in once in a while, but it didn’t work. The teammates were too loud, most of them had a wife and a house in the suburb and those 2.5 kids, and they laughed too much. None of them was smart, and witty, and too weird to live with.

He never went back to play rugby with them. Instead, he took up reading, and the silence suited his mood much better.

***

John quit at Sarah’s and went found a job working at an A&E department. The tremor in his left hand rarely showed anymore, just as the pain in his leg. The work was more exciting than what he had at Sarah’s, but not by much. Despite what people think, A&E was usually filled with more people who caught the flu or a fever than anything really life-threatening. The most excitement he got this month was from a drunken car accident, which he would not wish a repeat upon anyone.

It was a sad thing to think that he would find no more pleasure in his work even if he could return to Afghanistan. He might be an adrenaline junkie, but he liked to work with Sherlock more due to the fact that the detective was his best friend with whom he enjoyed spending time together, rather than because he needed a fix. The battlefield was everywhere if you squinted enough to see it, but the only war he wanted to fight was beside Sherlock.

_Sentiment. Anyway, I told you that I am a fake, so the battlefield wasn’t real, the me you knew wasn’t real, and neither was our friendship. Nothing was real._

“Shut up, you know you are not a fake.”

The rent at Baker Street was high for an unemployed doctor who had been recently injured, but affordable for one working almost constantly at A&E. He couldn’t stand to leave the flat for someone else to rent, just as he couldn’t give away any of Sherlock’s things. Sometime it felt as though Sherlock was only away for a while, and would come back any moment.

“You’re like a mourning widow,” said Harry when she came to visit him, and not smelling like alcohol. She was in one of her better periods, one of those in which she was actually pleasant and mostly sober, for her standards at least.

“No I’m not.” John denied, pouring himself a cup of tea. He needn’t bother himself with checking whether the cups were clean anymore, and that made him surprisingly nostalgic.

“You were talking to him.” Harry stated.

“No I wasn’t.” John frowned.

He was.

***

John went to a coffeehouse, and ordered the largest and darkest cup of coffee they had to offer. It was raining, again, and it was kind of strange, because it seemed that it rained a lot more since that hateful sunny day. A woman sat there, playing with her phone, when it happened.

Due to his prolonged contact with the detective, he could no more lay eyes on a woman without realising that she was either married, cheating on her boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife, or clingy and boring. Of course he was probably wrong more than half of the time, but it does ruin his first impression of most women he would like to date.

This time was no different.

_She **is** cheating, you idiot. Look at the ring! She doesn’t do manual work and had obviously put on some weight since the time she married, but it still slides smoothly over her finger. Why? Can’t be more obvious than that. Why else would she take it off?_

“True isn’t it.” He chuckled darkly, before freezing on spot.

Oh, so he was talking to himself. Or Sherlock. Whatever.

_You just realised it now? How observant of you._

No wonder Sarah used to give him those looks. A middle aged man with a shaking hand muttering constantly under his breath was rather worrisome for most people.

_Although you are not most people, it still does look rather worrying._

***

It was something to be said about his mind that, once he realised that he was hearing Sherlock’s voice in his head, the voices stopped. The irony was not lost on him. He used to limp from a psychosomatic limp which he knew wasn’t real, just as he knew the voices were a pale imitation of his dead flatmate. However, the more he willed his limp to go away, the more it persisted, while the more he wanted to hear the voices again, the more he became aware of the silence.

His mind must hate him, for what he couldn’t decide. Maybe it was because he had always been so repressed, a good requirement for being a doctor, a soldier, and an Englishman.

It was not as if his mind could get the voices right anyway. It was then that John realised that he couldn’t remember the exact inflection of his friend’s voice anymore, and he cried himself to sleep.

It was rather undignified, but he was that way most of the time now, so he needn’t worry.

***

When John was troubled, he liked to clean.

Harry called him Friday night, and she was drunk again. She was maudlin and bitter and as self-centred as ever. She had been kind of nice the few months after Sherlock’s funeral, just as she had been when John first came back from Afghanistan, so he couldn’t turn her away.

She complained about Clara, that abusive bitch who treated her as if she was unworthy of her attention. John thought this was totally untrue. Clara was the most patient and understanding woman he had ever meet, and she had always been a supportive and affectionate partner. If anyone was abusive in his sister’s relationship, it was clearly Harry, but John wasn’t going to say that aloud.

Harry then complained about her new clients, a paedophile whom she hated but must still defend at the tribunal to ensure a fair trial, and a truck driver who was drunk when he hit and killed a university student. She usually finished her tirades this way to justify her drinking, so that John may not find the opportunity to lecture her on her alcoholism.

But then again she already loved the bottle when she was sixteen.

So he cleaned.

He cleaned the kitchen, with Sherlock’s chemicals labelled in one cupboard and the condiments in another which still had the sign “Food only” on. He cleaned the fridge, which was almost empty as he couldn’t bear to open it every day without finding human body parts in it. He cleaned the floor, which was bare from suspicious spots which required him to find his gloves. He cleaned the table, and the microscope labelled “Property of St-Bart’s”. He cleaned the test tubes, on which the dust would have never settled if their owner was still alive. He cleaned the skull, under which he found an old packet of cigarettes.

He cleaned until his hands were scrubbed red and he wanted to scream.

***

John still went to the grave regularly, with flowers from Mary’s. They were good friends now, always chatting about this and that. It would seem that she loved to read too, and she favoured anything related to Greek mythology.

The Greeks had a very interesting view of the underworld, Mary explained. There were the five main rivers, which reflected the emotions associated with death. There was Tartarus, which John understood to be some sort of hell for the famous, then the Fields of Punishment, the hell for the infamous. There was Elysium, a paradise for the extraordinary, then the Isles of the Blessed, where goes the soul of the elites. And of course, the Asphodel Meadows, a place for the ordinary souls, or to be more specific, a place of permanent boredom.

If this Asphodel Meadows did exist, he was there already, John thought sometime.

Everything was grey.

But he knew that this was probably just the depression talking, and he was sure that he would get better, one day. Because he was John Watson, and John Watson was a fighter.

For now, he was tired, and he would be sad a bit more, until he could gather enough energy to go forward.

***

There was a movement online, something called IbelieveinSherlockHolmes, and it could be found all over the internet. Fangirls the bunch of them, but it was still kind of nice that people cared.

Or think they care. Whatever.

John was both grateful and resentful.

***

One year two month and fourteen days after Sherlock fell, John found himself at a pub with some of his army friends, a few fellow health care professionals, two of the nicer lots of the Yard, Molly Hooper, and Lestrade. It was a rainy day, altering between pouring storm and sparse droplets, and none of them thought to bring an umbrella.

Everybody was cheerful about meeting everyone together after such a long time, and no one was insensible enough to bring up the subject of Sherlock Holmes.

They ordered some food and a few pints; no one here was young enough to get seriously drunk anymore. They made some jokes, one of the soldiers on leave updating them on the action still happening over sea: nothing major had happened recently, there had been no death and no serious injury among their friends.

A former classmate of John’s complained about a patient’s mom, and the optometrist of the group told a funny anecdote that happened at work. Molly continued with some corpse jokes which John thought was quite funny but awkward for most people, and the conversation turned to kids and family shortly after that. John went over some football stats with his mates, and still nobody mentioned Sherlock.

When the night ended, everyone seemed to have enjoyed themselves, more or less.

As they are parting, Lestrade cautiously asked if he was alright.

It was still raining.

John shrugged, his face wet and his coat drenched. The raindrops on his face felt like tears, but colder.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

The grief and guilt still felt like a wound that would never heal, but at least the world wasn’t grey anymore.

He didn’t know if he was supposed to feel happy about it.

***

He thought about dating Mary.

She was cheerful and bright, but not without deepness. She was stable and reasonable, but not without a sense of adventure. She was not conventionally beautiful, but still looked lovely to his eyes. And she made him laugh, which doesn’t happen often those days.

John asked her out, and it was a bit awkward because she seemed to know what he was going to say even before he opened his mouth, but still took a perverse pleasure in making him say everything out loud in the most explicit way. He loved her for it.

He still felt sad and guilty sometime, but everything is better with Mary. She didn’t expect him to snap out of it, but would stop him from wallowing.

She was the best thing that happened to him in a while.

***

About two years after The Event, John went on a date with Mary Morstan and brought her to Sherlock’s grave. She put down an asphodel beside John’s red carnations, and he told her about one of the numerous cases he never put online. He loved her, and Mary never accused him of leaving a part of him at Sherlock’s grave. She rather thought that Sherlock was part of him, and she had the most marvellous expression when he did something reckless to please her.

He toyed with the ring in his pocket.

Was it too soon? Too sudden?

He wanted her to marry him, to stay by his side when the world was grey and when he acted like a teenage boy. He wanted to share all his secrets with her, at least those he can bear to tell, and he wanted to be there for her when she was sad and faced with her own demons. Because he knew she had them, even though she never talked about them.

Proposing in a graveyard may seem indecent to some, but she was not one of those dull and ordinary women. Mary laughed, kissed him on the corner of his mouth, and said yes.

She told him that it was the most romantic proposal ever, and he couldn’t have done better.

***

The sun was warm on their back as they walked toward Baker Street, Mary talking about renting 220A.

221B will always look like Sherlock’s home, the flat of two bachelors who liked crazy things. John didn’t felt comfortable changing it and neither did Mary. And of course, in the eventuality of them having a child, they would need more space than John’s bedroom upstairs.

John opened the door, and instantly knew that someone was in his flat.

He sneaked upstairs, Mary following silently behind him, and looked through the open door.

In there stood Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective.

***

He punched him.

There was a lot of yelling and crying, with Mary calmly making tea.

John asked if Sherlock ever thought about what his death did to him, told him how the detective’s fake suicide almost broke him. He told him about the grief that followed him everywhere, constantly, and asked why Sherlock made him watch him jump.

They fought, John threatened to leave, but Mary was there and she ordered them to sit down and forbidden either of them from leaving until they could sort everything out.

John sulked, but in his heart, slowly, he started to feel happiness creep in.

***

The next day it rained, but it meant nothing. They were living in London for goodness’ sake, it always rained.


End file.
